I love The Three Musketeers in the same way I love Sherlock Holmes. Via their later interpretations.

I’ve read Dumas… a long time ago… probably when I was too young to really enjoy it. And after I’d seen the movie, and loved it.

Hmm. Let’s be honest. After I watched Kiefer Sutherland and some others and loved Kiefer Sutherland. The others were ok too.

ANYway, I love the idea of the Musketeers, and I adore reinterpretations. Thus, readers: Musketeer Space! Tansy is doing a gender-swapped space opera version and I am very much looking forward to reading it. She’s also experimenting with Patreon to see whether people want to support her in the endeavour, and is offering all sorts of incentives. Like promising to review Musketeer-related stuff. The first such is a review of the 2011 Musketeer movie involving airships and other steampunkery, which I tragically never got around to watching. Until today.

There are many, many amusing aspects to this movie.

Number 1: I’ve thought of Luke Evans as the new Orlando Bloom for a while now, so to see them in the same movie is hilarious.

Number 2: as Tansy points out, Orlando Bloom is doing his best to channel 1970s Elvis hair.

Number 3: Mads Mikkelsen chewing the scenery.

Like the Sutherland version, D’Artagnan is the most wet and boring of all the characters. I just don’t get him, and I eye-roll so hard at the thought of Chris O’Donnell that don’t even get me started.

I mostly agree with Tansy’s review, especially the desire to see Milady and the lads conduct heist after heist after heist. I do disagree with her about the Cardinal – remembering that I am no connoisseur of the original, I don’t think he was dull; understated, perhaps, instead of underplayed. Tim Curry was an archetypal villain in the Sutherland version and I can’t help but feel that this one was doing his best to differentiate himself. I thought it worked ok. I also disagree with her assessment of Constance’s speech about a lady in waiting not being as important as a musketeer – my understanding of this section is that she was suggesting she was in less danger partly because she was a woman, but mostly because her position as a lady in waiting offered protection. It is possible I misheard some of this exchange because the knitting was distracting me….

I am most saddened that, after a delightfully swoony prologue read by Matthew MacFadyen, he really just phoned in this performance. Not a jot on Kiefer.

I do not think this has a lot of rewatchability, so I am amused and impressed that Tansy sat through it a second time. It was genuinely enjoyable, and there may have been shrieks of laughter especially over the airship’s steampunk machine guns, but it is not a cinematic masterpiece.

Also thanks to Tansy, I now have “All for Love” stuck in my head. And I’m starting to fear that the Suck Fairy may have visited my beloved 1993 (gasp! 1993?!?) version…